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Leetcode Bootcamp — The Introduction
Welcome to part 1/81 in this mega series on Leetcode problems. If you haven’t heard of Leetcode before it’s an incredible online tool that helps prepare you for the technical problem solving portion of coding interviews at top tech companies.
In this series I’m going to be covering the top 80 Leetcode data structures and algorithms questions you can do to prepare for all things software engineering interviews and prepare for your dream job at a FAANGULDAT (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Airbnb, Twitter).
Why 80 questions?
Well, truth be told a lot of people do upwards of of 400 questions to prepare for the interview but this is pretty much known as a complete overkill by people that have been in the industry for a while.
Why?
Because doing that many problems to prepare for an interview is a signal that you’re optimizing for breadth and not depth. Simply put, rather than follow the Pareto principle and identify that 20% of problems that unlock the other 80% of solutions to these problems, you’re trying to memorize as many problems as you can and cross your fingers that you get asked these questions in your interview.
This strategy is a main reason why a lot of people bomb out of technical interviews after putting in so much work!
Simply memorizing the solution to a few hundred problems will not help you when you get asked a problem that requires you to apply what you know towards a new problem you have never seen before because that will happen.
Roadmap
Throughout my time studying data structure and algorithms I’ve identified several “buckets” most of these problems you will be asked come from. If you can master the art of pattern recognition and understand why some solutions are the best you won’t have to hit Leetcode for 5 months straight after work every single time you look for a new job.
Let’s take a look below:
- Arrays — Arrays are a great way for a recruiter or hiring manager to figure out if you know…
